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Hiding Secrets With Steganography On FreeBSD
BSD Forums writes "Bad guys in the movies all keep their wall safes hidden behind paintings. Is there a metaphor in there for your sensitive files? OnLamp's Dru Lavigne explores steganography, or hiding secret messages in images or sounds, with the outguess and steghide utilities on FreeBSD."
How many secret ways do you need to say "*BSD is dying"?
Predictably, it shows goatse.cx after a few moments. Why do people mod this guy up? He trolls EVERY frickin' story! He posts so much that I'm almost wondering if he doesn't have a 'bot to help out.
To myself I won't be lying,
that Free B S D isn't dying.
This was more clever than it was flamebait.
It wasn't very clever, either.
In fact, it was more insightful than it was flamebait.
grub is a known troll who has already posted a goatse link on this same article! Don't give him any karma!
Why should I have to risk screwing up my system using an unproven, unstable potentially dangerous system like FreeBSD? Why can't you just provide binaries for Linux, the industry standard for security.
And FreeBSD zealots, as much as this simple truth hurts, please don't mod this -1,troll or -1, flamebait, that is known as denail. I am rereposting this because some deluded zealot modereted it down. I have plenty of proxies thanks to comprimized BSD boxes, and I will keep on posting this until it gets a 5, insightful. So don't waste your mod points, just reply nicely, as you know, if I did s/FreeBSD/Windows/g I wouldnt need to tell you not to mod it down.
OK, I know this is very much OT but a busy site such as Slashdot should be able to help me out here. Bear in mind that I'm not trying to start a flamewar or anything; just want some good reasoned responses. Right...
Why should I use FreeBSD over Linux?
The reason I'm asking is this: despite having used Linux for many years, I'm constantly being told by FreeBSD fans to switch to their favourite OS. Some make pleasant suggestions, others act with great zealotry and tell me things I know aren't true. The way I see it is as follows:
Stability - Various BSD fans have told me that it's "more stable" and "crashes less". I can safely say that my Debian and Slackware boxes have _never_ crashed or kernel panicked in five years of use; yes, in comparison to a bleeding edge desktop distro such as Mandrake, FreeBSD is bound to be more solid, but proper, well-designed and thoroughly tested distros like Debian and Slackware are totally rock-solid.
Performance - I've been told by FreeBSD users that their OS is much faster than Linux. To make this judgement myself, I performed a few benchmarks with FreeBSD 4.8 and Linux 2.4.20, and also FreeBSD 5.1 and Linux 2.6.0-test. The differences were negligible, although on my 2-CPU box Linux was the clear winner. 2.6.0-test also showed more responsive behaviour on the desktop.
Hardware support - I had troubles getting FreeBSD running on my laptop. Linux supported the hardware much better, and has a significantly broader range of x86 support.
Software support - It's so much easier to find software that will compile natively on Linux. Yep, Ports are good, but they're nowhere near as tested and integrated as, say, Debian's stable repositories.
Security - Both OSes are pretty secure by modern standards, but I can't see the value in FreeBSD's updating method. With Debian, one simple "apt-get" command is needed to get the latest security fixes. With FreeBSD, a tiresome chore of CVSuping, compiling and installing is required, which is doubly annoying on lots of boxes.
Community - Even when I've researched my problem and read up on the docs, I've had BSD fans act incredibly obnoxiously towards me. That's not good at all.
Long term support - FreeBSD only supports each release for 12 months; this means that users have to upgrade. And although upgrading isn't too difficult, the end result is a slightly different system and difficult to target apps against (new features/bugs/changes is newer Ports releases etc). Meanwhile, Debian has over 2 years support for each release, and Red Hat offer 5 - perfect for corporate adoption.
So those are the criteria I judge an OS on, and while many BSD fans keep telling me to use FreeBSD, I can't see what it offers in the real-world over Linux (subjective licensing issues aside).
What concrete benefits does FreeBSD offer? Serious question. It appears that Linux wins in the above areas, but any input would be good to hear.
Moderators are selected from the Slashdot community, and so have the same biases. Six months ago I would have said that the Slashdot BSD section had a trolling problem. I think it's pretty clear now that Slashdot itself is a good part of the problem.
Slashdot has taken the attitude that the BSD community is responsible for cleaning up the problem via moderation, and failure to do so means that the community doesn't care. Since the community doesn't care enough, the reasoning goes, BSD really is, in some sense, dying and not worth saving. But this makes two assumptions that are easily shown to be false:
This ignores the asymmetry of the situation. A crapflooder with a dialup connection and an idle hour or two can post dozens of messages. For this, several community members have to use up all of their weekly (if they're lucky) mod points, knowing full well that the same misfit can come back and do it again minutes later.
There aren't that many more trolls or crap flooders in the more popular sections but there are a lot more moderators, so no one has to blow their entire allotment of mod points dealing with miscreants. (And I might note that all the complaints about trolls and crapflooding here indicate a community that would deal with the situation if it had the mod points to do it.)
The fallacy of this belief was brought home to me not long ago when I was metamoderated "unfair" twice in succession for down-moderating obvious trolls in the BSD section. And, as many of us have noted lately, there are an increasing number of irrelevant postings and even blatant trolls getting positive mods. Once again, the supposed self-correcting nature of moderation fails for lower-trafficked sections.
This is actually just the tip of an iceberg which threatens to smash Slashdot into a chaotic free-for-all; I don't think the BSD section is likely to be an isolated case for long (if this is even the case now). Just skim through the postings on nearly any technophile (i.e. geeky) subject, and see how little interest there is for true "News for Nerds" any more. At least the half the posts will be "Who the hell thinks this is interesting enough for an article?" or "Hasn't this been done before?" There is little moderation and it can take some time before the trolls and crapfloods get mopped up.
On the other hand, each tidbit from the SCO or RIAA affairs gets many hundreds of highly-moderated "Ain't it awful" posts, and at least for the first several hours obvious trolls get squashed in minutes. (This despite the fact that very little is newly Insightful or Informative any more on thse subjects, or even much left that is Interesting.) I'm sure that Slashdot gets loads of ad impressions when they run these stories, however, and perhaps the cynics who claim that this is the reason Slashdot runs them are right. But that's irrelevant; the fact is that as a result of these stories Slashdot's content is getting softer and softer, and therefore the average Slashdotter is more likely to be only a camp follower of the technophile community, driven by peer influence rather than an actual passion for computers and technology.
This is all grossly off-topic (except in the sense that Slashdot is a proper topic for a posting on Slashdot), and I expect some Offtopic moderations as a result. But over the years I've seen Slashdot becoming a bloated caricature of its former self, and this seemed as good a time as any to speak up.
--
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
Yes, I'm ENTIRELY SURE that users will believe your box has been up since the Paleolithic period. If you're going to fake uptimes at least make it believable.
-1 offtopic.
post it on www.kuro5in.org though... slashdot sucks.
OK, I know this is very much OT but a busy site such as Slashdot should be able to help me out here. Bear in mind that I'm not trying to start a flamewar or anything; just want some good reasoned responses. Right...
Why should I use FreeBSD over Linux?
The reason I'm asking is this: despite having used Linux for many years, I'm constantly being told by FreeBSD fans to switch to their favourite OS. Some make pleasant suggestions, others act with great zealotry and tell me things I know aren't true. The way I see it is as follows:
Stability - Various BSD fans have told me that it's "more stable" and "crashes less". I can safely say that my Debian and Slackware boxes have _never_ crashed or kernel panicked in five years of use; yes, in comparison to a bleeding edge desktop distro such as Mandrake, FreeBSD is bound to be more solid, but proper, well-designed and thoroughly tested distros like Debian and Slackware are totally rock-solid.
Performance - I've been told by FreeBSD users that their OS is much faster than Linux. To make this judgement myself, I performed a few benchmarks with FreeBSD 4.8 and Linux 2.4.20, and also FreeBSD 5.1 and Linux 2.6.0-test. The differences were negligible, although on my 2-CPU box Linux was the clear winner. 2.6.0-test also showed more responsive behaviour on the desktop.
Hardware support - I had troubles getting FreeBSD running on my laptop. Linux supported the hardware much better, and has a significantly broader range of x86 support.
Software support - It's so much easier to find software that will compile natively on Linux. Yep, Ports are good, but they're nowhere near as tested and integrated as, say, Debian's stable repositories.
Security - Both OSes are pretty secure by modern standards, but I can't see the value in FreeBSD's updating method. With Debian, one simple "apt-get" command is needed to get the latest security fixes. With FreeBSD, a tiresome chore of CVSuping, compiling and installing is required, which is doubly annoying on lots of boxes.
Community - Even when I've researched my problem and read up on the docs, I've had BSD fans act incredibly obnoxiously towards me. That's not good at all.
Long term support - FreeBSD only supports each release for 12 months; this means that users have to upgrade. And although upgrading isn't too difficult, the end result is a slightly different system and difficult to target apps against (new features/bugs/changes is newer Ports releases etc). Meanwhile, Debian has over 2 years support for each release, and Red Hat offer 5 - perfect for corporate adoption.
So those are the criteria I judge an OS on, and while many BSD fans keep telling me to use FreeBSD, I can't see what it offers in the real-world over Linux (subjective licensing issues aside).
What concrete benefits does FreeBSD offer? Serious question. It appears that Linux wins in the above areas, but any input would be good to hear.
Fuck1ng R3t4r|). "Lavaface" ? Cock-face more like. Fucking cocksucker.
Good idea, I wish I had thought of something that clever.
I apply that to how I approach my daily job, all the insults and petty fights and powerplays the other people play. It makes me strong.
because, dead men tell no tales!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
December 6, 2003 -- Struggling 2004 Democratic wannabe John Kerry fires an X-rated attack at President Bush over Iraq and uses the f-word - highly unusual language for a presidential contender - in a stunning new interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
Sen. Kerry (Mass.) used the undeleted expletive to express his frustration and anger over how the Iraq issue has hurt him because he voted for the war resolution while Democratic front-runner Howard Dean has soared by opposing it.
"I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, 'I'm against everything'? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to f - - - it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did," Kerry told the youth-oriented magazine.
Brookings Institution presidential scholar Stephen Hess said he can't recall another candidate attacking a president with X-rated language in a public interview.
"It's so unnecessary," Hess said. "In a way it's a kind of pandering [by Kerry] to a group he sees as hip . . . I think John Kerry is going to regret saying this."
Kerry was accurately quoted in Rolling Stone, said spokesman David Wade, adding the X-rated language reflects the fact that Bush's Iraq policy "makes John Kerry's blood boil."
Kerry yesterday angrily cited his war record in Vietnam when asked by a New Hampshire student about charges that it's unpatriotic to attack the commander-in-chief, fuming: "I left some blood on a battlefield that President Bush never left anywhere."
Two polls this week showed Dean leads Kerry by a landslide 3-1 in key New Hampshire.
Waaaa!!! Poor baby!
fgdfgdfnbsd dsfty fgsh sg
Unless you like sausage in your dropbox, stay out of San Francisco!